Evening Benediction
Brightness of beeswax candles sparkling through
our half-closed eyelids, stung with incense smoke,
we new boys stumble through the Litany,
the monks’ and seniors’ voices bearing high
the pure sopranos of us younger ones,
who only half conceal our loneliness,
beginning our first year away from home.
A final Miserere and Oremus,
the choir has stopped, the organ groans and squeaks
and the prior, monks and senior boys leave first.
We younger ones then follow close behind
towards corridors of raw sienna tile,
stone stairways to our beds beneath the cold
embrasures guarding tonsured bearded saints.
We flick for holy water. Over us,
between the font and door, a statue stands,
this Order’s only saint - from Normandy -
whose picture hangs upon the wall at home
in Carmelite brown and white and holding, as
her statue here does too, a small bouquet
of flowers to her breast. And now I stretch,
taking my turn to press the statue’s foot,
with its worn, damp satin feel, this amulet
that every boy before me here has touched.
The little toes are all silk-stropped away,
the instep worn to where the bone would be.
I’ve often wondered who the first boy was
who thought to reach and touch her foot this way,
what decades of the less than half-devout
had sought in plaster, worn like this to bone,
some superstition our religion bred,
more mystery to add to the mysteries
of bread and wine and candlelight and bells,
or in this gentle daughter of the church,
saw not saint, but sister, mother, girl.
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